The Shadow Child
by NorthOfNever
Summary: The child that the Kents lost observes them from beyond the grave.
1. Chapter One

THE SHADOW CHILD   
Chapter One

I had never drawn a breath. Not once had I expanded my lungs, filling them with the air of my world - I'd never even seen my world, nor had I heard it. It's odd to say the least, when you stop to consider that I wasn't even aware of my own existence until I existed no longer. 

It has been a year and a half since I died. My death was my first memory, the only memory I have in which I was still bound to my family, though the ties were wrought with anger, grief, and blame. Now, my presence is only felt through its absence, as my mother ruefully reminds herself to take only three plates from the cupboard at dinnertime. I never even joined them at the table, but in her heart I'm always there. She has boundless strength, my mother. Even in her grief she couldn't dwell on her own loss. I tried to hug her once, before I knew she wouldn't feel me. 

My father feels me like emptiness - I'm a faceless shadow of a dream to him, a shadow too thick to release and too thin to keep. He cries for me more than Mother, because he had no physical way to let me go. He loves unrelentingly, long after the thing he loves seems to be gone. The tiny slice of life experienced by his unborn child is like a severed limb to him, and like a wounded soldier who's lost a leg in battle, he swears he can still feel the life in it. I'm there, in his mind and heart, and when he closes his eyes he can hear my pulse. But when he opens his eyes, there is nothing. 

Julian says I'm fortunate because I was taken before I knew what pain was, or loss, or even need. He knows what those things feel like. He has a brother too - sometimes we watch them together. When I watch the people who would be in my life, I only guess at their emotions - or rather, I can only guess at how they feel. I almost never feel anything, because I never learned how. It's only when I watch my brother that I begin to believe that I might be human after all. If guilt and sorrow were weighty enough to push a man through the ground, you would find my brother at the Earth's core. Even when he's happy, I can feel his loneliness. It's almost the only thing I feel. 

I can also feel intensity. I try to use it to push through - Julian did it once, with his brother. If I can do it too, I'll reach out to Clark. He believes it was his fault that they lost me - but it was me who left. I'm safe, and it's those who love me who are left to suffer. I want to tell Clark I'm sorry I couldn't hold on, but I just wasn't meant to be there. 

He was. 


	2. Chapter Two

THE SHADOW CHILD   
Chapter Two

I first found my parents hanging upside down in an overturned red pickup. You see, Clark? You're not the only one. The only difference was that when I crashed, nobody saw me hover near the window and smile like the cherub that I am. 

At least that's what Julian says I am. He says that only I could smile at my mother dangling helplessly beside my broken father, but he doesn't understand - I bridged two worlds in that moment - I was almost alive, and I could feel the pulse of her blood as her body cradled me. I had just enough life left to feel the warmth of my mother, and I had died just enough to be aware of it. How could I not smile? I had only an instant to embrace my life before I floated away from it, and I smiled at my mother because she'd been a beautiful home. 

Clark and I are not so different. He descended, I ascended, neither of us by our own choice, each of us thrust into a world we didn't understand. When I collided, I left destruction in my wake - suffering, heartache, loss - I leveled my family with one stellar blow. "What did you do, Clark?" That's what my father said, with bitter accusation, but it was me who traveled through the sky and left brokenness behind me. Clark never dodges culpability though, and took more blame than was his to bear. He's a good brother. He's a good son too. Better than me. 

My father loves us both fiercely, and that has never wavered, but for one instant - one moment that was just long enough - he was too stricken by my leaving to let Clark know how unchanging his love is. My father slipped through the door of my mother's hospital room and let it fall behind him, and as the latch clicked into place, Clark's impervious body became a momentary shell, empty of reason. In one day, I'd cost my parents both of their sons. 


	3. Chapter Three

THE SHADOW CHILD  
Chapter Three

I don't understand why Julian thought it so strange for me to smile when my mother's life was so literally hanging in the balance, because when I first met him he was watching his brother with rapt anticipation, his own face joyfully alight while his brother's consciousness drifted away. I saw no joy in that. 

Julian didn't explain much to me then. He said it was because I'd only just arrived, and after never really living I wasn't ready to be told. Not yet. He never really did give it to me in words, but it took little observation of Julian to realize he'd been almost delighted when his brother nearly died. 

Julian was lonely. 

Had it not been for Clark's monumental self-oppression, I might never have understood what it was that made Julian hunch over day after day, retreating into himself as he insisted that he didn't need anyone. Having lived for even a short while between his mother's womb and eternity left him incomplete, because he'd given some of himself to somebody who understood him - but Lex could not accompany him here. 

Julian says that only Lex could still feel his existence - their father had numbed himself to it long ago, though occasionally it took an extra drink to keep the memory at bay. It was only Lex toward whom Julian felt no bitterness. It was only his older brother who had never wronged him, though for so long Lex believed otherwise. Julian craved to push through and show his brother that he bore no fault in his death, but it was so long before he found the strength. Until then, Lex carried the guilt with him like a pocket watch, out of sight but always linked to him. 

Julian gives himself the blame for his brother's darkness. He says that if he'd been strong enough, if he'd held on, then no offense would have been laid on Lex's shoulders. Their father's eyes would never have held the kernel of indicting contempt that always burned in them when fixed on his eldest son. Perhaps even their mother might have persevered, though Julian could never think of her without condemnation. She was the only one who could come to him now, but she remained lost to him. Each of the Luthor men had lost Lillian, but each in a different way, and Julian blamed himself for them all. 

That, I can understand. 


	4. Chapter Four

THE SHADOW CHILD   
Chapter Four

It's peculiar, this business of seeing things the way that nobody else in my family can. But even in its strangeness I can't help finding it an apt trait. In my family, being different is what makes you belong. 

It's only when we try to deny that which makes us unique that there is any real rift between us. My brother tried to break away from who he is, from who he will become. I assume he thought it was almost noble at first, thinking he was giving up the conduit to all the answers he sought for the sake of family harmony. At least that's what he told himself he was thinking, in those brief moments afterward when he tried to justify his actions to himself. But most of the time, he didn't try. Like the true Kent that he wanted so desperately to be, Clark heaped all the blame upon his own shoulders. That's the first thing I learned about my brother. 

In the months since the day I left my family behind, I've grown no closer to understanding pain, or fear, or bitterness. I don't know elation, fatigue, anger, desire, or guilt. But I can feel the weight of some unspoken responsibility, and that is solely mine. Clark's loneliness is the only thing that reaches me, so I try to reach back. 

So far, I've managed little more than trying. 

Metropolis was eager to help Clark forget and welcomed him into its darkest folds. I could see inside him then - his isolation was so barren that I think he almost felt me there. At least that's what I believe. 

He kept the company of the city's vibrant and beautiful people, swimming with them in the undercurrent, but he couldn't bring himself to be swept away. He often longed to, hoping for just enough latitude to give him even one solid minute in which he didn't truly care about anything - for sixty seconds of unbound lightness, free of the constricting guilt that ensnared him. But not even the red stone in his ring had enough power to infiltrate so deep a place in his heart. 

So, while he began every evening with a darkly charming smile and a girl with likely willing intentions, he ended it alone, tortured and broken from the inside out. The soul of vulnerability. 

It was only there, in the dark behind closed doors, that the real shades of Clark Kent emerged that summer. 

And it was only me who ever saw my brother cry. 


	5. Chapter Five

THE SHADOW CHILD

Chapter Five

Here, time passes differently than it does for my family. Not faster, nor is it slower. It's like stillness in motion, where we hang suspended in empty air while lives begin and end beneath us, around us, between us. We don't measure time in seconds, minutes, days, or years.

We measure it in memories.

But I don't have any. Not from my life. The span of my existence only lasted as long as my journey, which was almost instantaneous. I was a flash, a fleeting presence.

I learned to flash again.

Not in the same way, of course. I can't literally go back, curl up inside my mother and pretend until she wakes that I will one day have the life she'd dreamed for me - or rather, let I her /I pretend. I have no such desire. I don't know what it means. But I learned what it is that I am - because of how I was lost, I can be found. That's how I flash. In my parents' eyes I can be seen in those hazy spaces between dreaming and waking - I'm there just as they open their eyes, an instant before the light comes in and they blink against it.

Then I'm lost again.

But I know they can feel me.

I shouldn't do it as often as I do, because it leaves them subdued throughout the morning. They exchange heavy looks through eyes that are now empty of me, my mother smiles wanly and tries to hide the tear - but my father never misses her tears, even when he doesn't see them. It's always that way. But still I go back.

I suppose you could say I was selfish, if I knew what selfishness felt like. I know what it looks like though. I've seen it, born of loneliness, contempt, denial, greed, and pain. I saw it in two people the summer after I died.

The first was my brother. Clark could never really be purely selfish, but he was selfish for a pure reason.

Hunger.

He craved peace, he longed to forget, he was starving for numbness, and nothing could give him that. He took whatever the unbound beast inside him wanted, with almost no regard for who might be hurt by it or how, all in the hope that he might truly become what he believed he was. A monster. Falling prey to the worst of himself was so much easier than facing the pain he'd tried to leave behind, and he believed it was the only way. He could only keep his head above water by first drowning his reality. He was driven by his consuming need to no longer be who he was.

Clark's selfishness, I knew, was a façade. It was part of the shell he'd molded around himself under the influence of the red stone in his ring, the barrier that protected him from feeling too much and forgetting too little. It was a powerful illusion, but one thing Clark didn't understand - I still don't think he does - is that the power of his purpose far outweighs the hold of any stone. That's why there were lines he wouldn't cross. That's why he couldn't get swept away with the trail of beautiful girls attracted by his outwardly confident swagger and deceptively devious grin. That's why he didn't do what he could have done when Lana came to him. That's why he'd buy a car and give it away. There was no satisfaction in any of it. Nothing left him sated, because there was nothing that he truly wanted. Not there.

The only things he wanted - the things he needed - were the things he was certain he'd destroyed. But if ash turns to ash, and dust to dust, what does something made of love return to?

Something forged of bitterness, however, is ash and dust to begin with. The brand of selfishness I saw in Julian might have toppled me, had I experienced enough life to feel the fire of it. He too was driven by hunger, but his was tainted, colored by contempt and madness. He plunged his own brother into madness with him.

That summer on the island was the first time Julian reached out to Lex, but he never quite broke through. He says it was because Lex lied, that he never really loved him at all. That he only pretended to. I know that isn't true - I even knew it then, although I'd only just arrived, because Lex's bond with Julian was one of the only pure things about him. Those who leave the way I did can sense purity.

Julian said those things when he was wounded. I wanted to ask him what pain was like, as I didn't know. I imagine it to be like dough under a rolling pin. That's one of the things I watch my mother do with fascination - rolling dough. The pin goes back and forth, over and over, relentless, wearing the dough thin in places, piling it thickly in others, pressing it and pulling, sometimes tearing it. Sometimes bits of it stick to the pin and they're never put back the same way. It looks like pain to me.

Whether Julian's pain induced his selfishness, or his selfishness wrought his pain, I still have not learned, but he was changed after that summer, like the dough that's been rolled too thin. He reached out to Lex on the island… and Lex reached back. They spoke every day, Lex believed he saw him - they were friends. Julian was genuinely happy, what I imagine to be for the first time. But something clouded Julian's perfect reunion.

His brother did not recognize him.

Lex called him Lewis.

Julian tried to pretend that it didn't matter to him, that he could be content with the illusion as long as his brother was there - the only person who hadn't betrayed him in life. Now in death, Lex was the only one Julian wanted. He was a little brother again, the companion he was meant to be. It was the role he'd been robbed of. He couldn't see the way that Lex saw him though, and he couldn't understand why his brother wanted to leave.

Why he wanted to leave him.

Again.

I've learned that Luthors cannot abide solitude - none of them, for any length of time. They fill the emptiness in their lives with people who don't really belong there, but they take up the necessary spaces for the time being. Julian refused to acknowledge that Lex did not belong there - that he still had life to live. He tried to convince his brother to stay - he told him how he hated his father, how he'd been forced out of his family by little more than a slight of hand. He thought Lex would sympathize, but it terrified him - because he saw the same hatred in himself. Julian pleaded and reasoned and begged, tried everything he could think of to make his brother stay.

Until his brother turned on him.

Lex called him crazy, he slashed at him with words and a blade, screamed at him hatefully until Julian had been bled dry of hope and humanity. Lex never knew what he'd done, but in his descent into madness, he'd severed the ties that bound him to the only real family he had. The only part of it that had always loved him.

Lex still believed then that he was the one who killed his brother.

He'll never realize it, but on the island that summer, that's exactly what he did.


	6. Chapter 6

THE SHADOW CHILD

Chapter Six

From my distant perch, I have vast perspective. Across the stretch of humanity that I observe, one thing is constant.

The need to define love. The exhaustive search for an answer to that ageless question.

What is love?

I know.

Love - in its truest and purest form - is the unfaltering willingness to do even the most difficult thing you can imagine for the sake of another's wellbeing, even if it costs you your own.

I know of nobody more loving than my father. I was never so proud to call him that as when he and my brother erupted through that window and hurtled toward the rooftop below, the cascade of glittering glass raining down with them. I felt fear in that moment, and almost selfishness too. I felt Julian beside me and we watched them fall together, knowing my brother would survive and being almost certain that my father would too, but doubt had crept into me - I don't know how, I didn't even recognize it, but it gripped me and for a moment I feared that the power Jor-El gave to my father would fail, that it would be taken from him too soon. In that instant I also understood the rapturous zeal with which Julian had watched his own brother descend earthward from the sky. Watching death race up to meet someone that you long for - the one thing that can bring that person to you - it's intoxicating, and for a breath of a moment I hoped it would happen. Though it would have left my mother alone and my brother without his guidepost, I hoped that my father would die.

But only for that one, terrible second. Then I saw the smile that spread over Julian's face like a pollutant oil - because he was happy for me, and envious - and I was disgusted by how close I'd been to being like him. I understand his hunger, but I am not a Luthor. The possibility of having my father present with me brought me a flood of things I'd never known I could feel - hope, fear, longing, revulsion, guilt, regret. I only felt them in that interminable fraction of a minute while my father and my brother tumbled downward, plummeting toward uncertainty.

Then I remembered.

That is my father, falling to what could be his last breath.

That is Jonathan Kent. Husband, father, a man who knows love. A man who does not know selfishness. A man who would dive from a skyscraper window and through a skylight if it meant saving his son from destruction. A man who would put his own fate in the hands of something he couldn't see just to have the _chance_ to redeem his son. A man who could look into the demon behind his son's eyes and dare it to kill him. A man who believed in the power of the love between a father and son enough to know that it could overcome such possession.

I am a son of Jonathan Kent.

This is how I know love.


End file.
